Revolution is in the air. They say that MOOCs will create a “tsunami” in higher education: Recorded classes by a few superstar professors will eliminate an expensive and duplicative professoriate. Even the college campus may become economic flotsam in this New Age.
History and economics strongly suggest that this scenario is likely to be utter nonsense. Consider one historical fact: This has all been tried, and it has failed.
I do not refer to the loosely analogous prediction, made in 1885, that mail-correspondence students would soon outnumber students on campuses. Nor to the prediction by the then chairman of the FCC that radio lectures would move higher education forward by 25 years, nor to the lavish hopes for “educational television.”
I am referring to 1998 to 2006, part of the dot-com era, when universities and private financiers created online-learning opportunities like MOOCs. I watched those enterprises carefully because they were potential competitors. From 1990 until late 2006, I founded and then ran the Teaching Company, which produces “The Great Courses,” noncredit classes taught by some of the country’s best college lecturers. For a time, we also ran an online university. With a few exceptions, however, the dot-com-era ventures went bust. Including ours.
NYUonline, begun in 1998 with $21.5-million, folded in three years. Columbia University’s $25-million for-profit venture, Fathom.com, begun in 2000, folded in 2003.
An exuberant advocate of MOOCs might contend that the failures were due to university leaders who lacked the business savvy for such ventures. Really?
UNext began with $180-million, three Nobel laureates in economics on its board, and an alliance with Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. The enterprise lurched around in search of sustainable markets for top-flight courseware, including standard degrees and “minicourses” in business topics for client companies. It reportedly spent $120-million by 2001, including as much as $700,000 on a single course. As the entrepreneur says in Jurassic Park: “We spared no expense.” UNext’s plan ended about as happily as the movie did.
AllLearn was an alliance of Oxford, Stanford, and Yale, headed initially by the late Herbert M. Allison Jr., formerly of Merrill Lynch and later of TIAA-CREF. It closed in 2006. Global Education Network was backed by the investment wizard Herbert Allen and a board of former college presidents. Its goal was to provide Ivy League-originated courses to everyone, particularly other colleges. It failed in 2005.
Über-competent people with big-dog financial backing could not make it work. And back then we had computers, the Internet, and online video, too.
We also had the laws of economics.
Apply this fundamental rule to the breathless reports that hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for MOOCs: Anything free and of value will have a huge number of consumers.
What happens if you charge for a MOOC? The University of Texas at Austin started a psychology MOOC this past fall, planning for as many as 10,000 students and promising millions of dollars by charging $550 per non-UT enrollee. About 125 people were engaged to produce and administer the course. Drum roll: Fewer than 50 non-UT students enrolled, yielding about $20,000.
With paltry revenues, can costs be kept low enough? Upfront production expenses can easily run to six figures. MOOC makers reply that, with a “one to many” potential, a MOOC can reach 10,000 students for the cost of reaching 10 “at zero marginal cost per student” after the initial six figures. But a book, the original one-to-many breakthrough, achieves the same marvel. We would probably regard a college degree based on no more than reading a pile of books as a swindle. We expect faculty members to guide students.
The rebuttal is that computers allow “many to one” interaction between a professor and far-flung students. That potential becomes, however, a fatal pitfall if extra students cost extra money.
Zero cost? Thousands of professors have taught millions of students in real online courses—which have often cost more than on-campus courses do. North Carolina’s legislature financed two comprehensive studies that found online courses costing 29 percent more per student than on-campus versions did. Another careful comparison calculated that an online course required six times more faculty-student interaction than its on-campus version did, and that online costs increased in direct proportion to enrollment.
By ignoring history, MOOCs inherit a tough problem in economics of higher education.
Dismiss dire analogies to digital publishing and music: If an author had to hold discussions with each reader, a book could be as expensive as, well, a college course. There’s no such thing as a free student.
By ignoring history, MOOCs inherit a tough problem in economics. At only one hour per student, a midsize MOOC, with 30,000 students, would take a full-time faculty member 15 years, and about $1.5-million in salary, to review papers or answer questions. That obvious calculation is not a reduction to the absurd; it is the source of the absurd MOOC strategies to reduce their own disruptive tsunami—of students seeking an actual education.
Alternative possibilities: Enlist graduate students to help. But then work now done by graduate students—like teaching tuition-paying students—would have to be done by someone else, who would have to be paid. Or teach with cheap, less-experienced part-time faculty members. But that would increase the dropout rate, which already plagues online courses, MOOCs, and lenders.
Or have interactive teaching occur entirely among the students themselves, on discussion boards. Remember Father Guido Sarducci’s routine on Saturday Night Live about a “Nude Wrestling” shop on 42nd Street? A pretty girl takes his money, takes his clothes, and tells him to come out wrestling when the bell rings—when another customer will come in to wrestle. “That guy, you know, he was as shocked as me.”
And you won’t even get a diploma.
The final MOOC retreat is to have computers teach, the magister ex machina miracle. That approach has some proven merit for introductory quantitative courses with clear right and wrong answers. But that level is only an introduction. The human redoubt is in judgment: After the mechanical basics, the quantitative disciplines require meta-knowledge about the proper application and limits of algorithms, meta-knowledge that produces not true or false answers but only better cases to be made. Ask a real scientist: The flow of inquiry, doubt, and resolution inherent in the enterprise of thought has not yet been reduced to a set of finite rules.
For the humanities, accustomed to ambiguity, interacting with computers is essentially useless. The Teaching Company’s online university offered a master’s degree in liberal arts. Stellar faculty members recorded the lectures, and on-site faculty members wrote thoughtful answers to students’ questions, stored for reuse by other students. I cannot remember that we got the same question twice. The liberal arts are open-ended.
If you do not allow faculty-student interaction, the MOOC is a cruel joke on students. If you do allow faculty-student interaction, the MOOC is a cruel joke on those people who helped finance a money pit. Because universities pay to create and run most MOOCs, perhaps the final reckoning will be delayed by hope and weak accounting systems. But judgment will come, even if you can fool all of the universities some of the time.
Could MOOCs succeed by having other universities replace their own faculty members with recorded courses? The dot-com historical evidence is compelling: No. Add this: The Teaching Company spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising in the past 20 years, and is well known in academic circles. Universities could have replaced any professor’s lectures with a fine substitute. To date, the institutions that have used Teaching Company lectures for credit-bearing courses can be counted on two hands.
Even assuming that MOOCs could provide equivalent education—which is dubious as evidence comes in—and aside from the enormous hurdle created by faculty resistance, a purchased MOOC simply shifts the expensive online-interaction problem back to the university’s own angry faculty. It is difficult to understand what incentive a university has to adopt an expensive course of uncertain effectiveness that leads to faculty revolt.
To be sure, there are promising results from “hybrids” using MOOC courseware and face-to-face classes with on-site faculty members. But that narrows the MOOC market to enrolled students near a physical campus; selling a MOOC would be done one professor at a time, like textbooks; and no savings would be evident, because MOOC quizzes would focus on in-class work on specific problems, requiring extra labor. San Jose State University’s chief academic-technology officer reports that hybrid MOOCs there require “just as much time to plan and prepare for group exercises as it does to prepare a new lecture.”
While morphing MOOCs into hybrids or “ambitious textbooks” will make them less ambitious, doing so does point to alternatives. “Flipped” college classes—with online readings, lectures, and intermittent quizzes to focus in-class teaching time on pockets of student misunderstanding and on discussion—have tremendous potential to succeed through imitation and iteration.
Imitation. Imitation is not just flattery; it is a royal road to success. Because professors receive almost no training in how to teach, clear information on teaching excellence makes significant improvement possible. Universities should share data—for a fee or free—on the success of their own best flipped classes so that other professors can see in detail what works. They may even buy information, adapting it to their own students and needs.
Iteration. If educators commit to regularly revise flipped courses based on student success and feedback, they will, over time and with much effort, be able to create something insanely great. The race will go to those who evolve courses most quickly and ably.
Instead of firing professors to reduce the cost of a college education, these two opportunities could, instead, use faculty members to greatly increase the value of a college degree.
That isn’t a technological tsunami on the horizon. It may be a sunrise.
